‘Legion’ Finally Introduced Charles Xavier in the Most Tragic Way Possible

With FX’s Marvel comics adaptation Legion entering its final season, it was pretty clear we needed some closure on the whole issue of David Haller’s (Dan Stevens) parentage. We’ve had hints that the uber-powerful mutant’s real father was classic comic book character Charles Xavier, a.k.a. Professor X; but no confirmation, until this week’s episode, “Chapter 22.”

Not only did we get to meet Xavier in the form of actor Harry Lloyd (of note, he’s only called “Charles” here but come on), but more importantly we met David’s mother Gabrielle Haller (Stephanie Corneliussen) and got to witness their whole, tragic backstory. Though, true to Legion form, there are a lot of questions about what was, and what was not real.

Spoilers for Legion “Chapter 22” past this point.

Here’s the (relatively) straightforward version of what happened. After “the war,” Gabrielle and Charles are both in a mental hospital, presumably somewhere in the United Kingdom. Gabrielle was in the camps, Charles was a soldier using his mental powers to make German soldiers kill themselves. Though it’s not specified which war they were involved in, this lines up nicely with the couple’s timeline from the comics. There, Gabrielle was a Holocaust survivor, and ended up in a mental hospital with Xavier and his frequent frenemy Erik Lehnsherr, a.k.a. Magneto.

The master of magnetism doesn’t show up (though we do get to see Gabrielle and Charles in a chess match later on, a classic Magneto/Professor X set-up), but the romance between the duo does. Charles uses his powers to nudge Gabrielle out of her catatonic state, and they share some cherry pie — shades of David’s first “date” with his love interest Syd (Rachel Keller) in the very first episode of Legion — and then go on a dating montage, to the same song David “heard” the first time he saw Syd.

Eventually, Gabrielle confesses that she wishes they could have a real life together, and Charles reveals he has a “trick” he can do: they leave the asylum to applause from the other inmates and doctors, and move to a house down in more Southern climes. There, they have David, and when he’s just a little baby, Xavier builds his first Cerebro in the basement. With it, he’s able to mentally track down another mutant, though one not quite like himself. That would be Amahl Farouk (Navid Negahban), a.k.a. The Shadow King, who Charles travels to Morocco to meet — leaving Gabrielle alone.

There’s some info here that’s important to know that’s not included in the episode, that we learned back in Season 1: once in Morocco, Charles discovered that Farouk was pure evil and battled him on the astral plane. Farouk was seemingly destroyed, and his body carted away and hidden. Meanwhile his mind, his essence, went to take revenge on Xavier by heading to possess David as a baby.

For Gabrielle, this takes the form of a haunted house thriller. She wanders through empty rooms without Charles, only a crying baby David by her side. All the while, she hears strange music, and sees visions of a man, people smoking, more. Turns out that’s also David, albeit the David we know. He’s using Switch‘s (Lauren Tsai) power to travel back in time to try to prevent Farouk from ever possessing him, though for unknown reasons the time-traveling duo only manifest as ghostly images of themselves.

Anyway, back to the past. Gabrielle is slowly going insane (again), wondering if she and Charles ever left the asylum at all. Was his trick making the asylum residents let them leave? Or was his trick making Gabrielle think they were leaving? She starts to see doors missing, or in the wrong location. She has a vision of Baby David with no face. A room without windows or doors. Charles calls, and we see the letter she has been writing to him is nothing but a thinly drawn curve in pen on paper, no letters or words apparent. And then Adult David appears, intoning in a deep, monstrous voice, “MOMMY.”

Gabrielle collapses just as Charles enters, disintegrating the vision of David and throwing him back into the otherworldly hallway that allows Switch to access different timelines. Meanwhile, Charles cradles the still body of Gabrielle Haller as in the background The Shadow King possesses David. As usual with these sorts of things, it was David’s interference that caused the chain reaction leading to his own doom.

That was the straightforward version, by the way.

From watching the rest of the series, we know this is when Charles felt he was unable to continue raising David, and left him with another family. We also can intuit that this is where Xavier went to go search out other mutants, and started the X-Men. Though they haven’t been mentioned in the series, and this doesn’t tie into X-Men movie continuity, you can see how the vague post-World War II of this episode could lead into the groovy ’60s/’70s feel cultivated in the rest of Legion. It also may not explicitly contradict the James McAvoy version of Xavier, though reconciling timelines has never been the franchise’s strong suit.

Rather than ranking Xaviers, though, more important is how Legion‘s version of Charles and Gabrielle inform who David is, and perhaps will become. There’s a lot of talk in the episode about how Charles hopes his son isn’t like him (meaning, powered), yet he also eagerly searches for those like him without a regard for his wife’s sanity. That tracks with how David has been this season in particular, always claiming his actions are for the greater good, while really serving himself. And Gabrielle is the same, she hopes he doesn’t have her lack of faith in humanity, her view that the world is dark and evil at its core. Yet by episode’s end, he literally has darkness inside of him, in the form of Farouk, his one true parent.

Basically, they both failed David, and therefore the world. They lost everything. Any trauma they attempted to alleviate through coming together back in that post-War asylum came back a hundred-fold, and eventually destroyed them both. As mentioned, there’s the question as to whether they did ever leave the asylum — and ultimately, the answer is probably “no,” that whatever they were died in the war, and what was left afterwards was ghosts. They were the ones haunting that house, not Adult David, not The Shadow King… It was the remnants of their lives that were left behind.

Given the parallels between Gabrielle and Charles, and Syd and David, there’s certainly a question looming over the rest of the season as to whether a cycle of mutual destruction can be avoided. For the former couple, though, it’s too late.

Legion airs on FX Mondays at 10/9c.

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